Give Us Liberty!

Join Brandon Mendelson as he gives you a behind the scenes look at the making of his comic, "Liberty: The Second City Saint". Check out the free preview comic here!

[ltliberty]

Come Experience Brandon Mendelson's Astonishing Tales Of Mediocrity

Hey! I’m moving this blog. I won’t delete this one until traffic dies off, but I’ll be moving all Liberty related articles (and random thoughts on comics) to the new website at http://www.thebrandonshow.com . So come check it out.

[ltliberty]

What is the appropriate amount a 9-foot-tall green woman should cover up in order not to be considered ‘pervy’ by Harvard professors?

G. WILLOW WILSON

[ltliberty]

Come Check Out The Liberty Preview Comic!

 Here is the link.   (Update: You can also get the preview comic here as a.pdf)

Make sure to Right Click and select “View original.” 

This way you can see the whole page and read the text better.

In that Dropbox folder you’ll find:

1.The cover page (Page #0).

2. The comic itself (Page #1-8)

3. The song created by Adam WarRock about Liberty

4. And a link to the Spotify playlist I used when putting the comic together.

Originally I was going to roll out all this stuff slowly, but I’m not entirely sure on what I’m doing with the comic at the moment. I’m (possibly) going back to school in August at Buffalo, and there’s a lot of stuff that needs to get done between now and then. 

So, instead of making everyone wait, I thought I’d put out what I have now for you to enjoy.

(Special thanks to Francisco Trebuxet for the amazing work on the art for the preview comic.)

Update: I added a link to the .pdf version of the comic so you don’t need Dropbox. Feel free to pass the .pdf on. 

[ltliberty]

Ant-Man, Black Panther to Appear in 'Captain America: Civil War'

Captain America's name may be in the title of "Captain America: Civil War," but he's just one of several superheroes scheduled to appear in the comicbook adventure. Paul Rudd, the star of this summ...

The Captain America films are my favorite Marvel films. This ... does not seem like great news. I’m excited about Black Panther and Spider-Man, particularly because Spider-Man plays a major role in the actual Civil War comic but after Avengers, yeah, not so hyped about what sounds like another bloated film.

It’s a Marvel film. You and I know you’ll love it despite its flaws, but you can have too much of a good thing. So, I’m adjusting my expectations for this.

[ltliberty]

Yup. Sounds about right.

[ltliberty]

Non-Spoiler Avengers Review

In a word: Meh.

Ok. No, it’s enjoyable while you’re watching it, but that’s about it. I guess you can make the same point about most Marvel films, but I’d point you to Captain America: Winter Soldier to refute that. (Aside from the first Iron Man, the second Captain America film is one of the best Marvel Cinematic Universe films to date.)

Disclosure: I’m a big Captain America fan. All you need to do is take one look at Liberty to get that, so I have a bias.

There were two major issues I had with “Age of Ultron”, which seem to be a running theme that the studio won’t address because they tend to stick to a very strict formula for their films.

1. Marvel Villains Get The Short End Of The Stick

Question: Since Thanos first showed up, what does the movie going audience know about him? If you guessed “Basically nothing”, you’d be right. And this is the main villain for the Marvel Universe.

Almost every villain Marvel has trotted out has been a slimmed down caricature of themselves. 

Except for Loki. Loki is everywhere to the point of annoyance (at least for me.)

We’re even getting MORE Loki in the next Thor and probably the next Avengers movie. And even with him, I’m not exactly clear on what his motivation is anymore. You figure at the end of the second Thor movie he would have at least evolved somewhat because the film does a good job of steering him in a different direction, but then Thor ends where it does and you’re like “Welp, here we go again!”

This has me pretty concerned about Thanos. Thanos is a fun character with a dark sense of humor. He isn’t a bad guy in that he wants to comically murder everyone because he’s an asshole, like pretty much every major Marvel movie villain we’ve seen so far. He’s arrogant. He wants to replace God and be worshipped. The Infinity Gems, when together, would allow him to do that.

(There’s a whole love affair thing Thanos has with the living embodiment of Death, but it’s super weird and probably not something they’re going to put into the movies. There’s only so far you can take a mainstream audience, you know?)

Ultron suffers from the same problem as Ronan (Guardians), the Red Skull (first Captain America film), and even Malekith (second Thor movie.) They’re all great characters, but you spend so little time with them or their complexity is boiled down into “I’m a bad guy. Here is my evil plan to MURDER EVERYONE” and that’s about all you get in the films.

Ultron has a lot of personality, and it’s by far the best interpretation of that character that I’ve ever seen in terms of what little we’re given of him. But. There’s nowhere near enough of him in the film, and that leads to some glaring inconstancies concerning some of the things he does and says. (No spoilers, but if you watch the film you’ll know what I mean.)

It just seems like such a waste of a character.

Also: If you read the comics, you also know there’s a very clear thing that happens involving Ultron that ties him in with the Guardians of the Galaxy as their bad guy. 

The newer versions of the guardians, which they used in the films, have a real shortage of villains beyond Thanos. Especially when you factor in the tricky issue of what studio owns what space character.

Go ahead and name a Guardians villain that you’d see a movie involving without saying Thanos or Ultron. 

Galactus? Nope. Fox owns the rights. The Chitari? Nope. Saw them in the first Avengers film. Annihilus? Nope. Fox has him too. The Shiar or Gabriel Summers? Ditto. 

Ronan? Dead. The Collector? Saw him already. Nebula? Maybe, but is she interesting enough to carry an entire film as a villain when we already saw her play second fiddle to both Thanos and Ronan? Venom / The Symbiotes? Maybe, but he’s been seen in a movie, a bad one, and they’re re-booting Spider-Man. So the odds are good they’ll sit on Venom for that.

The Skrulls? Nope. Fox. 

That leaves you with (removed to prevent possible spoilers for people who only watch the movies) and The Grandmaster, who Thanos kills for the last Infinity Gem in the comics. Neither are exactly compelling, but given the way the first Guardians movie ended, you’re probably getting (removed to prevent possible future spoilers).

The Avengers film goes in a different direction on the Ultron front. This is really disappointing because James Spader did such a great job bringing that character to life. Watching him fight the Guardians while controlling The Phalanx (also owned by Fox) would have been awesome.

2. Way Too Much Extra Bullshit

A lot of other people have pointed this out, but while the film itself is entertaining, there’s A LOT going on. Way too much. Which has always been my other concern with the films beyond the issue with the villains. 

There’s absolutely no reason why a Marvel film, featuring a villain that’s barely there, should run more than 90 minutes. A lot of them are getting longer than that, but I think a good part of that has to do with the creeping bloat of the universe and the need to please everyone. This film is almost three hours, and you could have easily dropped good chunks of it to get it closer to two. (Thor basically has nothing to do and the thing he does do is kind of weird and unexplained beyond the results of it.)

I’m kind of hoping that after the Infinity Gauntlet film (Avengers: Infinity War part 1 and 2), that they sort of stop. Or at least conclude everything they need to with this group of characters and hit the reset button. 

You’re asking a lot of a global audience to keep up with multiple characters across a variety of films that are not always the same quality of the last. (I didn’t like either of the Iron Man sequels for the same issue I’m pointing out here with the villains. Whiplash is not a great villain. Neither is the half-assed but understandable attempt at tinkering with The Mandarin because, make no mistake, The Mandarin in the comics is pretty fucking racist and could use some tinkering, just not THAT much.)

One other thing: If you’re in keeping continuity in the films, then you have to be all in. And I think there’s a way to do that without the kind of bloat we’re seeing too.

For example: To not have the TV Shield characters show up (particularly Mockingbird because she’s an Avenger in the comics, and Skye because she’s an Inhuman and Marvel is going to push the Inhuman thing HARD over the next few years) is pretty glaring. 

Without spoiling things, there’s something that happens toward the end of the Avengers film and if you watch the TV show (which is built on the entire premise of being IN the Marvel Cinematic Universe), then to not have them show up at that point, even briefly, seems dumb. 

Coulson I get. That would require a lot of time and explanation, but if you seriously want to tell me they couldn’t have May show up doing something with Fury, then I’d call bullshit on that immediately. It would have taken no more than a minute or less. “Oh hey, that’s Agent May from the TV show! She’s shooting shit!” and that’s all you would have needed to do. It gets the job done and it’s quick too. The movie audience (who may not watch the show) doesn’t need to know who Agent May is. They would just see her and go, “Oh cool. She’s here to help” and that’d be it. No extra information needed.

I watch SHIELD, but sometimes I wonder why. Not having ANY of those characters in the Avengers film, no matter how brief, calls directly into question why you should bother watching the show. (I don’t count Maria Hill because she’s always been a movie SHIELD character who just randomly pops up on the show for a cameo.)

I like that show most weeks. Other weeks it’s kind of boring and you can tell the writers are clearly circling the wagons and waiting for the next thing to happen in the films before they can advance the plot, but the whole idea of the show is that it’s linked with the films. But if you do a major Avengers movie, and the TV characters aren’t there even though it makes all the sense in the world for them to be there (except Coulson), then what’s the point? Why wait for the films before you can advance the plot? Why not just do your own thing?  At least with DC, as much as I DON’T like the firewall between the film characters and the TV characters, at least the TV characters get to do their own thing and not worry about the movies.

(Although if you ask me, the kid playing The Flash is great. How he and the rest of the TV flash crew are not part of the movie is beyond stupid. It’s seriously the best new show of the 2014-2015 season. Yes. I put it up there with Empire and Better Call Saul.)

Instead in this Avengers film we hear “I called in a favor from some friends” as it relates to Coulson and company. Ok great. I feel good about investing an hour every week to watch your friends who apparently aren’t important enough to show up!

Other than all that? The Avengers is an alright film by itself, but it’s not great either. It’s not like with Daredevil where I went out and bought a bunch of trades because I liked the show so much I wanted more of that character. (Which is really what these films should strive for. Can you name a single greater marketing platform for a comic book than the film that inspired it?)

I’ll probably forget everything that happened in this film in a day or two, but continue to be bummed about yet another blown opportunity with a great Marvel villain. 

P.S. I’m probably the only comic nerd who will say this: I’m not excited at all about Spider-Man showing up in future films. If there was a film franchise that needed to go away for a long time, it’s Spider-Man. 

You remember that Simpsons episode with Poochie? That’s what Spider-Man dropping into The Avengers is going to be like. You watch. Spider-Man is totally Poochie to the Avenger’s Itchy and Scratchy.

[ltliberty]

5 Lessons From Our First Year in Comics - Bleeding Cool Comic Book, Movie, TV News

I thought this was really interesting. I don’t know if I would go to a con and then charge people for Liberty, or any indie comic. I think you’re better off doing a big print run, getting some advertisers or friends to front the cost of the comic (or at worst, eat the cost yourself), and then give it away at the con. 

 There is something to be said about charging something vs. charging nothing (people sometimes associate “free” with “crap”), but I’m willing to bet since comics are such a small industry that you’d really be looking to get in front of as many people as you can, and charging for the comic might create too much of a barrier in that situation.

I sort of know how I’m going to promote Liberty once the preview comic is done (the other version that was done was done for book publishers and is more of an internal thing), and as I put that plan together I’ll post about it on here too.

[ltliberty]

The Liberty Preview Comic Is Almost Here!

It’s weird seeing 100 pages worth of notes get boiled down to eight pages of a comic, but here we are. In about a month, the Liberty preview comic will be done!

I think I got everything I wanted into the preview. It introduces you to the main character (Liberty), two of the lead characters (Lady Claw and Victory), tells you what the conflict is (without totally giving away what’s going on), and isn’t so subtle about who the villains are. So coming away from the comic, you have enough information to decide whether to keep reading it or not.

Although I have to tell you that I did totally chicken out and replaced one of the villains at the last second with an entirely new character. I did this because I’m not quite sure what happens next.

There are two scenarios:

1. Scenario A is that I send this around to comic editors and either they like it and want to do something with it, or more likely, they like it enough to offer me some freelance comic writing work, which is a way to get my foot in the door to maybe do something with this down the road once comic readers know who I am. 

(Assuming everyone likes what I do. I don’t assume anything. One thing I realized in doing this is that I don’t like a lot of dialogue or thought balloons since I want to tell the story as visually as I can and I don’t know how people will respond to that.)

2. Scenario B is that I just keep the story going from the comic and continue to pay for its production out of pocket (which isn’t cheap) and roll out each new page online on a regular schedule once I have enough of them to do that without there being a disruption in the posting schedule after launch.

Since I don’t assume anything, that’s why I pulled a specific villain from the last panel of the preview comic. In the event I do just keep the story going from where the preview comic ends, then you’ve seen her and there’s no way to build up to her being revealed. All the air is out of the balloon. Instead the villain that appears at the end more or less confirms who the bad guys actually are. Although I can tell you it’s not at all going in the direction you think on that front since we’ve seen the “evil” corporation thing a million times.

So instead at the end there’s another villain there, Sheena (aka Yolanda Reyes), who you’ll see in the last page.

Yolanda has an awesome design and back story. For those who may not know, Sheena was the first female superheroine with her own comic (she was created by Will Eisner and predates Wonder Woman by roughly four years.) The Ramones wrote a popular song that was based on her. 

So in doing the design for Yolanda, I kept some of the things that identifies her as a villain with her boss, but the rest of her design was based off this picture and The Ramones song:

I’ll do a post on Yolanda Reyes (”Sheena”) soon. 

[ltliberty]

Repeat After Me: Twitter Is Not An Accurate Reflection Of Reality

I talked a lot about this in Social Media Is Bullshit, but there’s some comics-related stuff going down this week and I just thought it was worth repeating.

For starters, I use Twitter. Obviously, so do some of you, since you may have followed a link on there to this page. I want to be clear: I’m not knocking the platform. If there’s a reason for you to use it (your audience uses it actively and in such a way that it makes sense for you to use it, then do so. 

If you need to contact journalists, because they’re stupidly obsessed with Twitter, then it makes sense to use it for those purposes.

Or, if you’re like me and you want to make a comic book and movie featuring your own characters, the entertainment industry is OBSESSED with how many followers / fans / views you have. So even if you think something is useless or stupid, which is more or less how I feel about Twitter these days and why I mostly stopped posting on there beyond funny pictures I find on the Internet, you have no choice but to use it.)

But, you need to remember something important: What happens on Twitter is not an accurate reflection of society or the world we live in.

You HAVE to understand that. 

It’s been reported that 16% of Americans use the service, at least at the time that I wrote my book. That number hasn’t increased much. In fact, it’s slowing down if not outright declining.

And if you notice, Twitter is counting an ACTIVE user as someone who logs in once a month. By their own numbers, of the 288 million monthly active users, 77% of them are not based in the states, and that’s before you adjust the number for people with multiple accounts, bots (spam or otherwise), brands with multiple accounts, fake accounts, and the spammers themselves. No matter how you slice it, the number of Twitter users gets smaller and smaller under close examination. 

Then you have to factor this: I always do this in my presentations, I ask people to raise their hand if they check the entirety of their timeline when they use the service. Out of at least 100 people, there’s only one or two that ever raises their hand, and I’ve done this in front of at least six thousand people at this point. Meaning that of the people who do actively use the service, at least more than once a month, a lot of folks just don’t see everything that’s tweeted. Twitter is not as big as they, or the journalists who love it, want you to think.

Journalists and bloggers love Twitter though, so what happens on there gets a lot of media attention, and it’s always the media attention that fuels more online activity (including tweets), not the other way around.

So when you see “people on Twitter” getting whipped into a frenzy over something, no matter how justified, you have to put that into the appropriate context. It’s a minority of people, not the majority. Does that mean they should be ignored? NO! But ... they also can’t be portrayed, as they often are, as being reflective of the rest of society or representative of all customers.

The Comic publishers, like a lot of major corporations, don’t act that way though, nor does the media, and that’s where the problem lies. We have a small group of people (comparatively speaking) who, sometimes justified, sometimes not, get whipped into a frenzy, and then the corporations fold because the media is running around and going, “Look at this thing blowing up on Twitter!”

Nope. It’s not Twitter. It’s the media and an increasingly broken economic incentive on the part of the media to hype trivial bullshit in the name of page views. (If there’s any sort of “bubble” out there today that I want to see burst, it’s the web advertising bubble. Once that pops, the frenzy you see over media outlets trolling for page views and using that as their key metric for success will die completely.)

It’s sad that I have to write about this again. I said this all back in 2011, and it’s still true today. Shit, 95% of my book (written in 2011, published in 2012) is still current because not a damn thing has changed.

Despite This, That Batgirl Cover Was Still Inappropriate

Where all this ties back to comics is the Batgirl cover (pictured above) where I felt the Twitter mob was totally in the right. I agree with them, the cover wasn’t appropriate for that specific comic. It would have been fine on another Batgirl comic as long as “The Killing Joke” is considered canon. I’m not sure it is though because DC keeps rewriting their history and it’s impossible to keep track of what’s in and what’s out anymore.

Why would it have been fine? It’s a cover paying homage to one of my least favorite Batman stories (”The Killing Joke”) but there’s nothing wrong with it objectively because the Joker is a frightening character in his current portrayal. Go back and read the recent “Death Of A Family” story (Batman 2011 Volume 3). The Joker had a mural painted on people who were kept alive basically as a giant human centipede with all of them sewn together. That we’re all ok with, but the suggestion that maybe he raped Batgirl? “Everyone” loses their minds. (Re: People on Twitter who don’t reflect society at large.)

It’s like that old Mel Brooks quote: “If I cut my finger, it’s a tragedy. If you fall down an open manhole cover and die, that’s comedy.” Massive, disgusting human centipede mural? Totally cool. Batgirl maybe or maybe not getting raped? Nope! (It’s not exactly clear what happens to Batgirl after she was shot in “The Killing Joke”. We know The Joker strips her naked to take pictures, which in itself is pretty fucking creepy given the fact that he was going to share those pictures with her Dad, but whether or not he raped her is inconclusive at best.)

The Joker is going to do bad shit. Including stuff that we’re not comfortable with. That’s how DC is writing him now. I don’t really like it, but you can’t have it both ways. If the character is being written as a total amoral monster who is going to inflict as much suffering as he can because he thinks The Bat Family makes Batman weak, and by eliminating them he’s going to make Batman a better hero (his motivation under Snyder), then he’s going to do awful things to make that point.

You would think, given all that, that I would be fine with the cover. But I’m not. I’m not because I feel like Marvel and DC have always been PG-13 (ignoring MAX and Vertigo for a second), and although I didn’t like The Killing Joke, when I saw in later years that people interpreted the sequence of events after The Joker shoots Batgirl as him raping her, I got really uncomfortable with it. And I’m into superheroine-in-peril porn! You know what the difference is? That’s porn. Batgirl isn’t. It’s a PG-13 comic, that kind of stuff doesn’t belong anywhere near a Batgirl comic. 

If Batgirl had been written as an adult book for adults, I wouldn’t have an issue, but it was never that, nor should it ever be that because a PG-13 book in terms of content can be accessible and enjoyed by everyone, whereas a PG product or an R product can’t.

That cover was never going to be ok for the current Batgirl series. It doesn’t fit the tone of the book. It doesn’t fit this version of Barbara Gordon, and honestly, although I think there’s plenty of room for “adult” stuff in comics in general, the Batgirl comic isn’t really geared toward the crowd who is going to be looking for that in this specific comic.

Batgirl in its current run has been wonderful. It’s accessible, tolerant, there’s a lot of diverse characters who are more than tokens, and it’s a fun book geared toward young women, which I think is awesome. So the cover makes no sense there, nor is even mentioning "The Killing Joke” to that audience.

Not only does that specific reader (probably) not remember “The Killing Joke”, since it was first published in 1988 and last reprinted in 2008, but they’re not really going to care enough to go back and read it. It’s not a great story, and Batman writers in the ensuing years did everything they could to ignore the story or have The Joker himself outright discredit it.

The Batgirl situation just reminded me of all this. We put way too much stock into what’s said on Twitter (usually for all the wrong reasons), but sometimes that angry mob is right. This is one of those instances.

That Entertainment Weekly post about the cover, by the way, is excellent. Although I really hate the Male Hardcore Fans vs. Everyone narrative that everyone seems to be running with. For one thing, there are male and female hardcore fans. I know many of them. So it’s kind of shitty to ignore that there are women on the opposite end of the argument too, especially if they too disagree with comic publishers and other companies bowing to angry Twitter mobs. 

P.S. Liberty is totally PG-13 for the reasons mentioned in here. 

[ltliberty]

(Art By: Peter Czaplarski)

So if you’ve been following along on the production blog, you can see this drawing as it came together. This is the final version of Brittany Cosgrove, the original Liberty, and her new profession: MMA Champ.

The relationship between the two Liberty characters is not the best. Brittany, despite being fired for dubious reasons by President Nixon in the ‘70s, hasn’t really aged much and still has all her powers. The new Liberty doesn’t really have any powers to speak of, if you’re not counting the arm cannon. So Brittany very much feels like she should still have her old job and that eats away at her.

(Brittany does NOT count the current Liberty’s arm cannon as a superpower.)

The new Liberty (Sara) was also a professional wrestler before the military recruited her, whereas the original Liberty is (currently) an MMA fighter, so she looks down on what the current Liberty used to do. I never understood the issue between MMA fans and prowrestling fans, but I thought that would be fun to play around with between these two. The current Liberty, Sara, wrestled under the name “The Second City Saint” as a tribute to CM Punk, whom she was a fan of, and that’s where this blog gets its name from. (Sort of like how Ric Flair and Buddy Rogers are both referred to as “The Nature Boy”.)

If you look closely in this picture you can see the Women’s Championship belt on top of the toilet for the AFA (American Fight Association), and of course next to the toothbrush is the original Liberty costume from the ‘50s.

Brittany looks more bulked up here for a very specific reason. She still has her powers, but nobody knows that. So now that she’s constantly winning fights and has a documentary crew following her 24/7, she’s taken to spending hours in the gym and eating what she needs to eat to bulk up and create the illusion that she’s winning all her fights because of her training, and not because she still has superhuman strength.

****

Project Updates:

-No movement on the romance novel just yet, although I did get the proposed book covers for it. I can’t start this project until my current writing project and “How To Be (Internet) Famous” is finished. The latter is going to be a relatively short e-book (20,000 words or so), so it’s looking like the Summer is when I’m going to focus entirely on the “50 Shades of Grey With Superheroines” novel. I had a drawing done with the villain and one of the heroines from the novel. It’s not appropriate to post here but it looks GREAT. I just don’t want this blog to be flagged as being not-safe-for-work, but I will post it somewhere eventually. 

-There are seven pages left of the Liberty preview comic to be drawn. There are also eight pages being done specifically for book publishers so I can cover both bases and pitch it as both a graphic novel and as a comic / movie. I’ll be posting them here soon-ish.

-The film script for Liberty will hopefully be done in July. I’ve had the plot and everything done for this for a while now but just haven’t put it in the right format. It’s more likely I make a short pitch document and send that to agents rather than do the full script though. Due to budget concerns the Liberty movie is different from the comic. Same characters, but different overall story. This way if I wind up making the movie myself it’s not super expensive to do.

So, I still have some things to do before Liberty really gets moving, but there’s progress, the story is there, and I’m really excited about the art I’ve been getting. 

The goal right now is to finish the first project in May, the e-book in July, the Liberty movie “pitch” also in July, and by then I’ll have all the art done for the comic and for the graphic novel pitch, so that’ll go out in August with writing on the romance novel getting started just before that.

[ltliberty]

Moving Liberty Out Of Chicago

I mentioned this in an earlier post, but man I am seeing Chicago EVERYWHERE right now.

And you know what? That’s awesome. It’s my favorite city. The food is excellent. The people are so friendly you’ll think they escaped from whatever underground bunker Mike Huckabee used to keep his live studio audience in when you meet them, the mass transit system not only looks amazing visually (or I think it does anyway), but it’s reliable and convenient. Everybody is good looking AND approachable. It’s just a great place. 

And then there’s the Cubs. (I have not yet met a White Sox fan. I don’t believe they actually exist.) There is no better team in all of professional sports that better personifies their host city than the Cubs. (You can insert a really mean joke here about the Browns and Cleveland, but I’m not going to do that.) The Cubs WERE great, but now they’re not, but they could be again someday, and that perfectly sums up the mentality of the city of Chicago.

The best line I ever heard when I was in Chicago was from a bartender up in Ravenswood. It was opening day for the Cubs and my friend Phil says to the bartender, “I heard the Cubbies got schlacked today.” Without missing a beat the bartender said, “Of course they did. It’s a right of Spring.” That’s the attitude Cubs fans have, and it’s awesome.

 It beats the shit out of the “I love you, Fuck you I hate you”* thing Yankees fans go through during every single at bat, and the “What? The team is winning? Well, I guess I better pretend to care. Go team!” thing that Dodgers fans do. (As a Dodgers fan, I can safely say this. If you say it, I’ll fight you.)

That doesn’t mean Chicago is perfect. Google both Mayor Daleys some time. Chicago has a lot of problems, but despite it’s reputation on television, it’s no different than any other major city in America.

This by the way is true about traffic in Los Angeles. You think traffic in LA is bad? Go to Atlanta or San Antonio some time and tell me you still think traffic in LA is bad. Same deal with the crime in Chicago. That’s not saying either thing is ok. LA is working really hard on expanding their rail system, and Chicago is ... I don’t really know what they’re doing for the South side and parts of the Westside, but clearly it’s not enough.

Anyway, as much as I love Chicago, I feel from a storytelling perspective that it’s getting overexposed. Between Chicago Fire, PD, and the forthcoming Chicago Med on NBC, Divergent and Jupiter Ascending (LOL) both recently being released and set there, and then shows like Boss and Happy Endings that were set there as well, the city is just everywhere, and I didn’t want to add to that.

Where’s Liberty’s New Home?

I’m not entirely sure. It won’t be LA, NYC, San Francisco, or Chicago. Definitely not Portland either. Two of my favorite shows right now (Grimm and Backstrom) are set in Portland, not to mention Portlandia, so that’s out too.

(Portland has better food than Chicago, but don’t tell anyone in Portland that I said that because they get kind of snobby about it.)

I was just in Las Vegas and Seattle. I was kind of taken by Seattle’s attitude about things. If you take the Seattle Underground tour, you learn that the city’s story of growth was something straight out of Mike Judge’s Idiocracy. And even to this day with the hilarious (and expensive) failure so far that is the waterfront rebuild (here’s just the latest headline on that one), I thought that was kind of endearing. Especially because the attitude there seems to be “Yeah, we know we’re dumb, but whatever. Want some coffee?”

Vegas, also potentially overexposed like the other cities I mentioned, is I think more interesting than you might think. Especially because you really are in the middle of nowhere, in a desert, with a declining supply of water. So yeah, if you want to focus on the gambling and potential for crime, it’s been done a million times with Vegas. Ditto with people getting blitzed and partying. But I don’t think I’ve seen a super villain roll into Lake Meade and hold the town’s water hostage, or worse, just drain it for fun. Not to mention, if climate change gets worse, which is probably will, that’s a situation that only escalates out there, and not for the better.

(By the way, if you actually live in the Southwest, as “fun” as it might be for a writer like me to dramatize this, I’d seriously be worried about this shit every day.)

The issue to me about all these cities is being able to tell a new story using well worn ground. You can’t really do that with NYC or LA. And Chicago is starting to get to that point of “We’ve seen every conceivable angle of this story, what else is there?”

So I want to go with a city where that’s not the case.  The Liberty preview comic (seven more pages to go before it’s done!) will be set in Chicago, but the actual comic will be set elsewhere.

Where? I’ll let you know when we get there.

***

*My Dad did this during a game once. He grew up in the Bronx. His father grew up in the Bronx. Back before the Yankees built themselves a palace that only the rich and stupid could afford to visit, he went to games when he could. Once when Jorge Posada was at the plate, my Dad was really excited, shouting “Alright Jorge! Let’s do it!” Posada proceeded to strike out, which my Dad immediately decided to comment on by going, “Fuck you Jorge! I hate you!” THAT is a Yankees fan, perfectly summed up. (Also true for every single NYC sports team’s fans except the NYCFC soccer fans ... for now.)

[ltliberty]

(Art By: Peter Czaplarski)

So if you're following the blog, you've seen the previous sketches from Peter as this drawing of the original Liberty has come together.

Now in this one you can see some of the character changes I was talking about. Brittany, after losing her job as a superhero when Richard Nixon fired her, didn't necessarily lose her powers, although the public thinks she has. Since she is aging way slower than anyone else, today she looks like she's in her thirties despite being closer to 90 than anything else.

Originally I was going to have her be an actress, but I think I'm going to save that for someone else. Instead, using her powers to cheat, Brittany has taken up MMA and is now their reigning women's champion. (In the back on the toilet seat near the film crew you can see her championship belt.)

The crew is there filming a reality series about her next title defense.

Off to the left is the original Liberty costume from the '50s, which is based on the Spirit of 76 hero from the '40s. The mask is from the (original) Black Cat, who also debuted in that era.

So far the plan with the Liberty comic is to do two sets of six issue mini-series. So Liberty infiltrating the super villain team in an effort to take them down would be the first series (which ends on a cliffhanger), and then there would be a second set of six issues. Read together it's one massive story. 

That's the plan. I don't know yet if that's exactly what will happen. Once the preview comic is done and out there we'll see what publishers think or if I'm releasing it myself.

But the original Liberty plays more of a role in the second set of books than she does in the first. 

More soon. I was away and didn't have a chance to update this blog, but now I'm back.

[ltliberty]

I have the next stage of this, which I'll show you next weekend, but I thought it'd be fun to show you how one of these pictures come together. Especially because this picture, and the original Liberty character, evolved in a fun and unexpected way as I saw this picture come closer to completion.

Updates!

-Progress on the Liberty preview comic continues to move along well. There are five pages done and ten-ish pages total. So we're almost there! Once the preview comic is done I can move into the next step on all this and start sending it to publishers and other people.

-I haven't made any progress on the romance novel just yet. Right now I need to finish the current writing project I have, write a book proposal for my agent, and then I'm doing this project with Barnes & Noble.

-I did start roleplaying online with a few female superheroine-in-peril fans though because I've never actually wrote that kind of thing for an actual audience. 

Since the romance novel is a BDSM-themed book about a superheroine, I figure if there was a group of people who'd be receptive to that sort of thing, it'd be them. It's also good practice as a writer because I'm exercising a part of my brain (the fiction writing part) that hasn't been used in a really long time. So far, so good. It's been an interesting experience. I'm also really surprised by the diversity in terms of age range and career types for some of the roleplayers. I feel like that alone would make a fun book to write (about the roleplayers) but it'll have to wait.

Either way, for writers, I totally recommend something along those lines since they're basically rapid fire writer prompts.

So, slowly but steadily things are moving along on the Liberty front. Next week, the original Liberty's character takes a fun and unexpected twist! One that gives her yet another reason to dislike her successor.

(The camera crew is your first hint, but I'll tell you: She is not an actress. I know I said last week she was, but then I saw the picture and I made a change.)

[ltliberty]

The Sex Positive Feminist Superhero From The '50s

Ok. Sex Positive Feminism wasn't really a thing until the '70s, but hang with me here:

This weekend, I (might) have a sketch to show you of the original Liberty. Not Sara Rodriguez (the current Liberty you've seen), but Britney Cosgrove, the original Liberty.

I have pages and pages of Liberty notes. Most will never get used, but I liked that America's first superhero was this eighteen-year-old high school senior from Kansas who gets injected with this serum back in 1953. It doesn't work on 99.9% of the people who get the shot, but she's the first, and it gives her superpowers. The government, who controls the serum, then hires her to "scare the commies" and to also help protect the homeland.

But when your parents are Catholic and you're raised in a really strict environment in rural Kansas, and all of a sudden you get these amazing abilities, you sort of go a little crazy. (That's my one complaint about the new Ms. Marvel. I love Kamala, but her powers haven't changed her as a person, and I feel like they totally would.)

And not crazy in a bad way, just crazy in the sense an eighteen-year-old would if she found out she is now aging way slower than anyone (she was born in 1935 and should look like she's in her eighties now, but doesn't look older than 32 in 2015), has super strength (the 1950's propaganda ads the government makes say she can lift six Buicks stacked on top of each other with ease), can fly, and also run fast enough to break the sound barrier, she really just wants to push the limits of what she can do and experience as a person.

(By the way, the current Liberty has NONE of those powers.)

When the first wave of the feminist movement hits, Britney (like Wonder Woman in real life) is held up as an icon and a symbol. So the original Liberty takes up with them and begins marching and protesting and becoming a spokeswoman. As the cultural revolution occurs across the sixties, the original Liberty gets rid of her old uniform and starts posing for Playboy after moving in to the original Chicago Playboy Mansion. 

(The impetus for this was that Playboy had first published Fahrenheit 451 in a serialized format, and Britney had gone to Chicago to meet Ray Bradbury at a Playboy Party. There Hefner asks if she'd pose for the magazine, which she does.)

The new costume is incredibly controversial for its time because of how much skin she's showing off, whereas the original costume (modeled after the public domain superhero, the Spirit of '76, ) she was completely covered.

The government starts to get upset and orders Liberty to see President Kennedy, and you can sort of fill in the blank as to what happens between Liberty and Kennedy given his reputation. He decides to leave her alone as does Johnson (who is too consumed with Vietnam to really care about what she wears.)

During her time living at the Chicago Playboy Mansion, Liberty starts writing essays for the magazine touting the work of other feminist authors and stating that a lot of the government's laws are restrictive for women. She is also an early advocate for the Equal Rights Amendment, which she often writes about.

When Richard Nixon takes office he fires Britney on a bullshit claim and basically blackballs her from everything he can. Out of options, Liberty decides to get into porn, finds that she loves it, and begins writing for whatever outlets that will let her about pornography. Specifically taking aim at the anti-pornography feminists in the process and then expanding her pieces into what Dan Savage basically is today, answering questions about sex and advocating different forms of sexuality, including BDSM.

After Nixon resigns, Cosgrove is offered her job back as Liberty but she doesn't take it. Instead Britney becomes an author, writing a bestselling self-help book called "You Don't Need A Cape To Feel Empowered". She writes more books throughout the '90s and early '00s while also becoming a vocal advocate for the LGBT community.

When the new Liberty appears on the scene in 2008, there's A LOT of tension between the two. For one thing, Britney was against the war and Sara had gone and served two tours over there.

More importantly, Britney is very happy and excited that Sara, who is a lesbian and a Latina, is a superhero. But. She was also hopeful the government would not assign anyone else the Liberty codename out of respect for her, and to also avoid potential generational confusion where kids may grow up knowing only the new Liberty and nothing about the original and her causes.

Also, because she still has her powers and feels like she's eighteen despite her age, seeing Sara run around as Liberty makes her regret turning the job down after it was offered to her again when Nixon resigned.*

So there's a little bit of resentment. Sara, for her part, sees the original Liberty as a role model and doesn't understand (or know) why there's a problem.

Finally, and this gets us back to the picture I was telling you about: The original Liberty decides to get into acting and is offered a role in a new superheroine film. So we're going to see her on set filming a scene in the picture when it's ready.

Stay tuned. :-)

*One key piece of info: There are very few superheroes and even fewer villains in the Liberty Universe. The only heroes that exist are all government employees, and any unauthorized use of superpowers is usually grounds for arrest and execution if you're deemed a threat to public safety. So even though Britney still has her powers, she can't use them without authorization. Even though she's a protestor and a fierce advocate, she knows she can do more outside of jail than in it.

[ltliberty]

This is our first look at Gamma Ray, as drawn by Peter Czaplarski. I'm really happy with how she came out, as is my friend Jackie, who the character looks like and shares a name with.

With Liberty, if I wind up self-publishing this thing, there would be six issues. Each one would be her going after a different villain while trying to maintain her cover as a new member of their group, "The Vault".

The 9 page preview comic we're currently putting together shows you how Liberty got into that group.

Lady Claw (who is in the preview comic), Gamma Ray, and Quiet are the three Vault members I have drawings finished for. The other three members are still TBA.

Where'd I get the name?

Admittedly, I'm a big fan of the German Power Metal band, Gamma Ray. If you're a prowrestling fan, you'll also know them as the band Chris Jericho had an incident with in one of his books, and his move "The Walls of Jericho" was named for Helloween's first album, which featured the current lead singer of Gamma Ray as the singer of the group at that time. (Helloween would go on to have a huge hit in the '80s with a different singer before more or less dropping off the American music map, but some of their later albums are pretty great if you're into that kind of music.)

If you noticed a theme, a lot of the characters in Liberty are characters you may have seen before in other comics with a slight twist to them. I don't know what the future holds or if I'll ever wind up writing comics professionally, so in case I don't, there's some stuff I always wanted to do with certain characters or takes on certain characters that I always wanted to see that I can do within Liberty.

Gamma Ray is a different take on Magneto. They both have magnetic-themed powers, but unlike Magneto, Gamma Ray is a straight-up villain. There's no grey area about her. 

In fact, that's what made this character interesting in the first place. The Liberty characters are all very self-aware. The villains aren't necessarily "evil", but they do have specific motivations for doing what they do. Gamma Ray is meant to be a throwback to characters that were evil for the sake of being evil. 

She loves the big entrances and the stupidly long villain monologues, and commits crimes because she's totally bought into who she is and what she wants to do with her life. It's a nice contrast to someone like Lady Claw, who could easily just be described as an "evil Batman" except Lady Claw steals and then gives that money to people who need it. She's not going around killing people arbitrarily, which is something Gamma Ray does. 

Every character has to have a specific motivation and purpose for me. I don't want them just sort of hanging out and taking up space if they don't move the story forward, and I liked having a big "main" villain leading the group of six. Gamma Ray's main motivation is to be evil and to show the other supervillains what (she) thinks they should be doing. She hates that so many of them are basically posers.

Like real gamma rays, she's also biologically hazardous. That's not revealed in this picture, but her henchman all have black and purple hazmat suits, and she usually can only be around the other characters if she's in a place where their powers are deactivated. (The police precincts in Chicago is one of those places, which is how they're taking a mug shot of her in the first place.) 

Pretty much nobody wants to be anywhere near her for that reason unless they have some kind of immunity to her abilities, which few do. For that reason alone the other characters are mostly afraid of her, but then you add in that she's this evil character and she's pretty much Satan to the rest of the Liberty characters. 

Just For Fun ...

There are two cover mockups being made for the "50 Shades of Grey with superheroines" novel I'm writing. There's one where La Amazona is chained up and the villain (the reader) is approaching her. And the other involves Gamma Ray putting a ball gag into a defeated La Amazona's mouth.

It's possible that Gamma Ray appears as the bad guy in the "romance" novel and I just put in another villain to lead The Vault in Liberty. I don't really know just yet since there's still a lot of time before the next step with Liberty can happen. (I have to have all 9 pages done to share with publishers) and in that time I'll be mapping out the novel itself.

Of course, that's what this blog here is for. As I figure out and work this stuff out, I'll let you know!

[ltliberty]

This is a throwback. The sketch above comes from a cartoon I wanted to pitch to Adult Swim back in 2007.

I'm sure I still have the notes somewhere, but the really short version is that I wasn't a huge fan of George W. Bush at the time, and I thought it'd be really funny if it turned out the president kept taking so many vacation days because he was actually the Hulk. "Dubya" took more vacation days than any other president.

My idea was that the president would randomly turn into a Hulk-like creature and it'd be up to a group of overachieving college students to track him down and bring him back to the Oval Office because the Secret Service agents were too busy partying with Columbian prostitutes. (Which is a thing that actually happened under a different president. The prostitutes ... not the president turning into the Hulk. At least, as far as we know anyway.)

So pictured above is Amaya and Travis, the two college students charged with finding and rounding up the hulked-up president using an assortment of gadgets, and also the hulked-up George W. Bush himself.

I kind of want to have this going on in the Liberty Universe for a couple of reasons. First because I don't want to use the current president (or whoever the next president is) because then it ages the comic. If you go back and watch the animated Dark Knight Returns (or read the comic) when you see Reagan as the president it does really date things. At least it does for me, even if it's later revealed there is no president and it's actually Brainiac and Luthor running things and oh God the Dark Knight Returns sequel is so bad I still get angry thinking about it. DO NOT READ THE DARK KNIGHT STRIKES AGAIN!

The risk is here to, if I used Dubya as the president, but I'm thinking I can do a Nixon-Futurama thing.

The other reason I was thinking of using this concept is that the Liberty Universe is meant to be a little goofy. Not completely goofy to the point where you can't take it seriously, but goofy to the point where even if they're dealing with serious stuff, there's always something funny that I can use to break things up so it doesn't get too dark or serious, which is a major problem I have with a lot of modern superhero comics. If I never see the words "grim" and "gritty" again to describe a superhero comic I could die happy. I know there's a place for that, and those comics have their fans, but it's just not for me.

Characters In Development

Anyway, that's not why I wanted to get this post online. I'm still dealing with some crappy stuff and I wanted to post an official update on some of the characters you can expect to see here on this blog soon while I work through that. In February you can expect to see on this blog:

1. Red 5 - Our transgendered superheroine who is also the defender of NYC.

2. Sunrise

3. A currently unnamed super villain ( I really like "Gamma Ray" but it sounds so lame.)

4. Eclipse (a Liberty supervillain who has nothing to do with the Sunrise character)

5. And the big one: La Amazona, the star of the "50 Shades of Grey with superheroines" romance novel I keep talking about.

I didn't even realize this until I just typed out the list, but Sunrise, Eclipse, and La Amazona fall more on the "sexed up superheroines" side of the costume spectrum. 

La Amazona and Sunrise because I was trying to match what they look like to what you'd see on a typical romance novel. (In a bookstore, that's where you'll find this book filed.) The guy super villain for that book will also look that same way.

Remember: Anything having to do with the 50 Shades of Grey with superheroines thing is not part of the Liberty Universe, so I'm not holding them to the same standards costume wise that I would the Liberty characters. Liberty is a PG-13ish comic. The 50 Shades of Grey with superheroines thing is a big honking R. Maybe even an NC-17. I don't know. That's up to the agent, editors, and publisher.

Eclipse, who is a Liberty character, is dressed the way she is because she's a super villain. I really wanted to use the comic itself to talk about the expectations everyone has for heroes and villains in comics. The characters are all very self-aware, and so I liked one of the villains just sort of having this attitude of, "I'm going to do whatever the hell I want and wear whatever I want, fuck you." It's really similar to Liberty's attitude, except one of them doesn't play by the rules, and over the course of the story where you see Liberty thinks more and more about becoming a supervillain, she looks at Eclipse in this costume and doing whatever she wants and it's just really appealing to her. "Why can't that be me?"

That's a long way of saying, everything with this comic has a reason for the way it is. I don't want anyone to look at Eclipse and go, "Oh well they just wanted to write and draw hot women." That's really not the case. Anything that exists within Liberty has a purpose, and so Eclipse looking the way she does has a specific purpose behind it in terms of the story.

As far as Red 5 goes, I don't have too much I want to say about her simply because I don't want to make it a big deal that she's transgendered. Liberty is a lesbian, and I honestly don't waste any time talking about that. It's 2015. Who gives a crap about a fictional character's sexual preference or choice of gender?

Red 5 doesn't play a huge role in this specific Liberty story I'm working on, but she is a major character within their universe and she does make a few appearances. The issue is that I'm sticking very much to "If it doesn't make sense to the story, don't include it" rule, and since Red 5 is the protector of New York City, and Liberty is based in Chicago where most of the story is set, there aren't a lot of reasons for them to interact with each other. You will see her though in the comic and I'm excited to get her drawn soon.

Alright, I said more than I planned on for today. If you're excited about Liberty and the 50 Shades of Grey with superheroines novel, tell a friend. There's a lot more to come.

P.S. As far as publishing of the 50 Shades style book goes: I met with my agent and was told I have to write the whole thing first, then he will take it and pitch it to publishers. So once I finish the current writing project I'm on, I'll start writing the full-length novel. Honestly, it's going to take at least a year at the pace I write. Maybe slightly more.

Then he'll get the manuscript, look it over, make notes and suggestions, and then off it goes. 

If for some reason it does not get purchased by a publisher, I will just put it up online for you to buy on this site. 

[ltliberty]

tl;dr: Liberty is basically reading smut when she's not on the job, and so the lead character of that smut novel is going to look smutty.

La Amazona (or just "The Amazon"), who is the star of the still untitled "50 Shades of Grey with superheroines" romance novel I'm now writing, does not have a practical costume.

I went back and forth on this with a few people (all women, for what it's worth), because all of the Liberty characters have practical, usually full body costumes and armor.

Victory, for example, is flying around in an armored suit that just has her face exposed.

Liberty herself is the one (superhero) exception, who is showing off her abs because the original Liberty (who now tours the country as a sex positive feminist speaker) had a really scandalous outfit, and the current Liberty wanted to do something to keep that tradition going.

This isn't something that slides either in the modern world, and the current Liberty is constantly dealing with jokes, catcalls, people shit talking her on the Internet, and trouble with her superiors for not having a regulation (full body) superhero costume. As a feminist though, the current Liberty's attitude is more or less, "Fuck you. I'm going to wear what I want."

With La Amazona, her costume has more to do with a few story factors and one other thing:

1. Being from South America and dealing with a much warmer climate, you're not going to run around in full body armor down there. It's not practical given the climate.

2. Since she more or less patrols the length of the Amazon River, she swims a lot, meaning she can't be carrying a lot of shit on her person either. (Although she does have this giant axe which we'll get to at some other point, but for now I'll just say that for her the axe doesn't have much weight to it.)

3. She's mostly invulnerable, so having armor is kind of redundant, but she's also catholic, so it's not like she's going to run around and not have any sort of costume either.

So from a story point of view, her costume is what it is.

From a reader's point of view, "50 Types of Capes" (or whatever it is I wind up calling the 50 Shades of Grey with superheroines novel) is a romance novel. I know, that's weird to say, but that's what 50 Shades is sold as. And if you've ever seen the cover to a romance novel, you'll know both the guy and the girl are totally sexed up, so La Amazona's look (and the look of the supervillain) are meant to match that.

Keep in mind: La Amazona is only part of the Liberty Universe in the sense that Liberty is reading the book. So if this thing blows up and you're like "I thought you were all about diversity and having the superheroines have different body types", I totally am within the Liberty Universe of characters. The Amazon isn't technically part of that beyond being a fictional character that Liberty is reading about as her own story progresses.